Free Maxwell’s Flame by M. J. Trow

There’ve been fewer complaints, let’s put it that way.’
    ‘Is there a Mr Striker?’
    ‘Leonard, yes,’ Rachel said. ‘Works for a computer firm. Such a nice bloke. He’ll be devastated.’
    Leonard Striker held his wife’s hand for one last time. She was covered in a green sheet and there was another one over the top of her head. Only her right hand trailed beneath the cover. Only her face lay pale, so pale on the mortuary pillow. Her eyes were closed, but puffy and purple with the bruising. They’d cleaned her up for him, of course. So that he couldn’t see the shattered cranium or the work of Anderson’s disc saws.
    ‘Yes,’ he said in a voice stronger than he’d hoped, ‘yes, it’s her.’ Somehow he couldn’t bear to say her name. Because saying it would have sent him over the edge. And he would have cried. Broken down. And it wasn’t in Leonard Striker’s nature to do that. Least of all in front of strangers. And for the first time in his life he was grateful for the fact that he and Liz had not been able to have kids after all.
    He turned away. Out into the corridor where a balding police detective shook his hand, muttering something to the effect that he would get him, however long it took. Out into the car-park where the rain was already falling on the tarmac and forming puddles on the uneven surface. Out into the rest of his life.
    ‘What a bloody miserable world,’ McBride muttered, watching him go.
    ‘It’s a formality.’ Warren watched him too. ‘That’s all. Just one more little step in the right direction.’
    McBride threw a sideways glance at his guv’nor. There were times when he didn’t want to be a Chief Inspector at all.

5
    Lupine was how Peter Maxwell described Lydia Farr. Not to her face, of course. Nor indeed to anyone else’s. It was one of those inner pronouncements that crusty old bachelors make to themselves and stick with because there is no one to qualify, no one to contradict. She wasn’t lupine in character; on the contrary, Maxwell wasn’t aware of her until he’d heard she’d fainted at the sight of Liz Striker’s corpse. It was just her face and her weird, yellow eyes. When she smiled, Lydia reminded Maxwell of ‘Mad Jack’ Nicholson, just before his axe came crashing through the door in
The Shining
. She had that aura of insanity about her, that mask of mania.
    In fact, Lydia Farr was a tangle of emotions and she always had been. The fat kid had been laughed at and teased by the boys and even when the puppy fat left her and puberty raised its ugly head, they laughed at her acne. There was no Mr Farr. Yet Lydia had not given up. Now in her thirty-somethingth year, she still joined karate classes and went to singles bars because that was where you found men. And habitually, she took herself down off the shelf of celibacy and dusted herself and put on her bravest face for the world.
    It was a long, pointed face, with a long, pointed nose. It didn’t remind John McBride of a wolf. It reminded him of the witch in the book that was now compulsory bedtime reading for little Sam. For little Sam McBride wouldn’t go to sleep until his dad had read to him the bit about the witch and how she had lured the hapless Hansel and Gretel to her gingerbread house in the woods. But this witch had been crying. She held a handkerchief in her bony hands and sat as still as she could facing the two detectives.
    A cold WPC sat at her elbow, compulsory under the new police code of practice, but as much use as a colander in a shipwreck.
    ‘We don’t want to distress you,’ McBride told her, ‘but we need to establish a few things.’
    ‘Yes, of course.’
    ‘Tell us about the finding of the body,’ he said softly. John McBride was nearly thirty. He’d done well to get to Detective Inspector, one of those pushy, degreed types his guv’nor had quietly complained to Maxwell about. What was left of his curly blond hair was wreathed in Lydia Farr’s cigarette smoke and